


Wait for me, I'm coming with you

by Evren Rambunctious (DHume)



Category: Skulduggery Pleasant - Derek Landy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-27 15:02:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1714847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DHume/pseuds/Evren%20Rambunctious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because I am disgusting, I wrote songfic. Kind of! Inspired by the Hadestown album, here is my Orphic retelling of the end of the Last Stand of the Dead Men.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wait for me, I'm coming with you

**Author's Note:**

> For best results, please listen to 'Hadestown' in its entirety before reading this fic, though passing knowledge of the myth of Orpheus is all you need, if anything. This is not a 'Hadestown'/Skulduggery Pleasant crossover; it does not keep the Depression-era theme of the album, nor the personas of the characters. It's more accurately just an Orphic retelling, but I played off this album a lot while writing it.

Mages, always morbid, were outdoing themselves today. The battle-scarred ground was littered with bodies, the wounded, medics or mourners. Any intact building that had not been co-opted as hospital was filled with China’s people, sorting out what was to be done, fending off international meddling. 

No one was looking for Skulduggery. No one left would have mourned if he’d perished, save the Grand Mage. He slipped away, past a large woman sobbing over a man who looked perfectly fine, “honestly, wife, it was only a scrape”, and walked away from everyone, toward a country lane that led away from the ruins of Roarhaven. Nobody stopped him. Five miles down the road it started to rain and Skulduggery walked onwards, feeling drops slide down his cranium and splatter onto his eye sockets. Before long he was soaked, the impeccable tailoring collapsing under the weight of the water and revealing the rail-thin frame. Ghastly would have been horrified; but now it hardly mattered.

Hours later he came to Cassandra’s house. He let himself in at the small gate, and raised his gloved fist to knock on the door. It opened.

“Skulduggery, come in.” Cassandra looked haggard. 

——

It had been hours, and Skulduggery still hadn’t spoken. Cassandra had never seen him so quiet except when he’d been in a killing rage. She worried that his anger would be soon turned on her. 

As Cassandra pottered around and asked after the few people she still knew, answered only by a nod or shake of the head, she realised; it was shock. Skulduggery looked like a small child who’d become an orphan overnight as he dripping onto her ragged carpet with no body heat to dry himself.

“Why did you come here?” she asked, finally. He looked up from where he’d been staring at her table, shoulder-blades hunched. 

“I need you to help me bring her back,” he said, voice somehow hoarse. 

Cassandra knew who he meant. She let out an involuntary sigh, almost a whimper. 

“She’s not lost. you know where she is. I can’t help you.”

“But she’s trapped inside her own mind,” Skulduggery countered, his deep velvet voice now broken and almost, improbably, whining. “If I can influence her mind, get inside there somehow, I can let her out. It’s like a mental prison. Surely I, you, we, can do something?”

Cassandra had heard of the everything the Skeleton Detective had done. She had once seen a vision of Lord Vile taking off his suit to reveal a skeleton inside, seen a future where Skulduggery succumbed to the power of the it and taken up Vile’s mantle for himself like Vengeous had, done terrible things. Even though it had never come to pass, she knew what he was capable off. But this surprised her. 

“You want to try venturing totally inside Valkyrie’s mind? In effect, possessing her? Something so dangerous, even countless highly trained Sensitives have gone mad in the attempt? You don’t know what you’re asking for, Skulduggery. Your chances of saving her rather than totally annihilating her personality or leaving her brain dead are infinitesimal. Not to mention the mental risk to yourself. This has never been successfully done within record, you know that? Even when the Sensitive and patient have been working together, given their consent. You will die if you try this. Don’t be ridiculous.” 

He chuckled. It sounded forced. “I don’t care about that. The worst case scenario is that Darquesse is stopped, and I am beyond caring. As it is, Valkyrie is for all intents and purposes already dead. How is this idea in any way unattractive?”

Cassandra felt a lump form in her already dry throat. 

“Aren’t you even thinking about the people you will be leaving behind? Who would mourn you?”

He turned his head up to look at her.

“Oh, really, Cassandra, you’d only miss me a little,” he said, tone teasing.  “And really, I have such a vastly overinflated sense of my own abilities, I’m assuming that everything will be okay.”

If he had had flesh, Cassandra would swear he would have been grinning at her. And not in a good way, either.

——

Skulduggery lay on Cassandra’s floor, limbs and magic bound. He looked perfectly calm. Cassandra eyed the dirty carpet, and rather wished she’d had a vision warning her she’d need to clean it.

“Now, remember,” she continued, “The chances of you succeeding, on a scale of one to ten in probability, is a one. The possibility of you both ending up mentally blank, like one of those, what do you call them-“ she snapped her fingers, “new-fangled VHS tapes after it’s been near a magnet is a ten. The probability of something else nasty coming back with you is about a four.”

“Hence the restraints.”

“That and the fact your body might overload and give you a fatal epileptic fit, although I’m not sure how that works without a brain.”

“That too. And VHS tapes are obsolete now. Valkyrie and I, _I_ , use DVDs for my collection.”

Cassandra smiled, despite herself. “Of all the things to worry about. I was kidding.”

“Ah.”

“Is there anything else you need? Last will and testament?”

“Hmm… No. Once I’m gone I would try and stop China getting her hands on Gordon’s library through Sanctuary shenanigans, and to tell the man himself what happened if no-one else has. Do not let anyone donate my clothes to charity. Give them to China. And give the Bentley a Viking burial.”

“Really?”

He turned his head with all the freedom of movement he had left. “Do I look like I’m joking here? Am I smiling in jest?”

“You’re always smiling,” she reminded him.

“I’m being serious about the Bentley.”

“Fine.”

She reached out with her mind, untethered it from his body, sent it on its way. As she came out of her trance and wiped the blood from her cheeks she saw that Skulduggery’s body had disintegrated, bones no longer held together with magic. 

“Oh shit,” she said to herself, her eyes welling up despite themselves, and went to inform China.


End file.
